Call for Paper – The Politics of the Mind. Mental hygiene in Europe in the Twentieth century

Call for panelists – Conference of the French History of the History of Science and Technology – Strasbourg 19-21 april 2017The Politics of the Mind

Mental hygiene in Europe in the Twentieth century
Organized by Grégory Dufaud (CERMES3-CNRS) and Nicolas Henckes (CERMES3-CNRS)
If the notion of mental hygiene emerged in the 19th century, it became popular in the first third of the 20th century in most European and North American countries. It described what appeared as a new way of problematizing psychiatric practices and knowledge as well as their politicization. Mental hygiene was at first a reform project based on the promotion of both alternative ways of organizing assistance and preventative practices in psychiatry. These perspectives became reality with the creation of new psychiatric institutions by psychiatric reformers. In 1908 psychiatrist Gustav Kolb opened an “open” outpatient service for the mad in Bavaria in order to help patients reintegrate society. This service was conceived of as an addition to the asylum: outpatient treatment aimed at extending the treatments received during institutionalization. Mental hygiene did not only address psychiatric practices however: of its project was also to scientifically reorganize societies. This project had several intellectual sources. In France, psychiatrist Edouard Toulouse’s mental prophylaxis was a dimension of a more general concept of biocracy, which aimed at promoting a scientific government of France. Toulouse’s thinking was inspired by positivism and evolutionism as well as republicanism. More generally, the development of mental hygiene reflected the role played in European societies by scientific and political utopias inspired by the ideals of social reform as well as totalitarian ideologies.

The historiography of mental hygiene has been restricted so far to the United States, where a great emphasis has been put on the work of Adolf Meyer. In Europe histories of mental hygiene have been fragmentary and have concerned mainly politically stable western countries with a well developed health system. Two important observations can nevertheless be made: first, the simultaneity of the emergence of mental hygiene in different European countries in the early 20th century and, secondly, its various shapes. As a result it is difficult to speak of a unique European mental hygiene movement, even though several international movements tried to promote specific ways of doing and knowing.

The objective of this symposium is to map European mental hygiene movements in the twentieth century, to characterize their specificities as well as their inscription in the European space. Four questions can be addressed more particularly:

1. The changing practices and institutions. How did mental hygiene innovate in the delivery of healthcare? How did those innovations propose a break with asylum practices?

2. Definitions of the normal and the pathological. What did mental hygiene add to the science of mental functioning? How did its promoters change nosological classifications?

3. The internationalization of psychiatry. How did local initiatives circulate? To what extent was mental hygiene a transnational movement?

4. Psychiatric and social reform movements. What relationships did mental hygiene have with other biopolitical projects such as eugenism and hygienism ?

This panel will be the first event in a series that will aim at creating a network of historians and social scientists interested in mental hygiene with the perspective of publishing what will be the first edited volume on this question.